Our customers are industry leaders in advancing risk management and compliance program objectives, and we have had the benefit of being deeply involved in their program maturity. As a result, we have learned valuable lessons about what makes risk management programs successful and what pitfalls to avoid.
In the past month, Gartner has released three research reports related to the GRC market, and we are proud that Gartner identified RSA as a leading technology solution provider in all three assessments: Gartner’s Magic Quadrant of Business Continuity Management Planning Software (RSA in BCM Leaders Quadrant), MarketScope for IT Governance, Risk and Compliance Management (RSA receives highest rating by Gartner in MarketScope for IT GRC), and Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance Platforms. We are grateful for our dedicated and pioneering customer base, whose innovative and market-leading use of RSA Archer GRC is testament to the evolution of the GRC industry.
So what makes Governance, Risk, and Compliance programs successful?
Often, they start by focusing their efforts where they have the biggest risks and thus the largest potential business gain. It is easy to see the challenges of enterprise risk management as an impossible mountain to climb and a vast effort requiring Herculean efforts to solve. But risk management doesn’t have to involve large and complex big-bang approaches. Our most successful customers have recognized that near-term victories offer the best potential for sustaining organizational focus and investment as they mature their risk capabilities. These customers place a priority on engagement with business stakeholders to understand their high-priority pain points, ensure they implement initiatives through foundational GRC capabilities, and achieve a demonstrable win for the organization.
Successful programs also ensure that these focused efforts are guided by a longer-term strategic vision for enterprise risk management. As we have watched our customers’ risk programs mature, we have seen two divergent approaches emerge. One approach takes small bites out of the risk profile of a company, but initiatives proliferate within their own domain. These programs tend to reach a point where the value of individual initiatives is tapped but the value of an integrated approach is put out of reach. The other approach looks at individual initiatives not only to solve the risk at hand, but also in terms of how they contribute toward the broader risk management mission. These programs generate individual successes while continuously building toward an even more significant business benefit along the way.
It’s become evident that our most successful customers in the long run are the ones that collaborate actively with their peers. We can’t point to a single one of our customers that has developed all the best practices and avoided all the pitfalls on their own. Since risk management is often an inexact discipline, the state of the art is constantly evolving. Our most mature customers have multiple levels of engagement with their peers—ranging from executives working together to learn how to drive program maturity, to functional heads collaborating to develop best practices in specific disciplines (for example, developing an IT risk management framework in the context of the bigger business risk), to technical teams sharing the implementation details of their risk and compliance management tool infrastructure.
Although managing risk and compliance is a fundamental part of doing business, many organizations struggle with determining the right course of action. Our customers’ successes are evidence of efforts well worth the investment, and RSA is proud to be a part of their solutions to this ongoing challenge.
Through our partnership with these leading organizations across the globe, RSA has learned that GRC is not a destination but a journey. We are pleased to help our customers navigate the winding road and accelerate on a path to success.